Reviews
Description
"Erik Fosnes Hansen's Tales of Protection consists of four enthralling tales about the nature of luck and chance. Each of the tales is a feat of storytelling in its own right: a story involving a young woman, her old uncle, and a blind, brilliant beekeeper; the story of a lighthouse keeper's harrowing experience during a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea; a story of art, love, and treachery in Renaissance Italy, where religious paintings have miraculous properties; and the story of a mining engineer whose life is changed by a terrible fall "over the edge."" The tales stand alone but are ingeniously stitched together; they are alike in that they dramatize moments when people change course entirely, and in that they hinge on an understanding of the nature of coincidence, which plays a role in human life something like "the music behind the music." The tales, and the theory of seriality that underlies them, give wide play to Fosnes Hansen's imagination.
"Erik Fosnes Hansen's Tales of Protection consists of four enthralling tales about the nature of luck and chance. Each of the tales is a feat of storytelling in its own right: a story involving a young woman, her old uncle, and a blind, brilliant beekeeper; the story of a lighthouse keeper's harrowing experience during a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea; a story of art, love, and treachery in Renaissance Italy, where religious paintings have miraculous properties; and the story of a mining engineer whose life is changed by a terrible fall "over the edge."" The tales stand alone but are ingeniously stitched together; they are alike in that they dramatize moments when people change course entirely, and in that they hinge on an understanding of the nature of coincidence, which plays a role in human life something like "the music behind the music." The tales, and the theory of seriality that underlies them, give wide play to Fosnes Hansen's imagination.
Reviews